Kristen Stewart: I become a director and give you a life jacket

AND Born in Hollywood, raised in the author’s cinema and became an icon of the “Girl Power”. Bella (it was also the name of his character in the saga Twilight) and combative. «What happens to women scares me damn. We created female movements, we made steps forward. And now the world seems to slip back. We walk on a thin wire like a knife blade, without seeing where we could fall ». Kristen Stewart speaks with a determination of its own, between poetic and sudden expressions “Fuck!”in a flow of consciousness that it is impossible to summarize without doing a little wrong. A wave that looks like his first director’s film: The Chronology of Water, Out of competition at the last Cannes Film Festival and in our cinemas in the next season.

It is a story of suffering and female redemption of the stretch from the homonymous Memoir of Lidia Yuknavitch (The chronology of wateredited to night) which on the screen has the face of IMOGEN POOTS. Having become a cult, the book traces the childhood of the Californian author marked by paternal abuse and maternal depression. Crosses the abyss that followed – dependence, self -destructive behavior – but also the desire to re -emerge: As a teenager through swimming races, as adults with a writing that puts the body’s awareness in the foreground.

Kristen Stewart: “I become a director and give you a life jacket”

“A cry of rebellion that has struck me,” says Kristen. At 35, the actress and neo-regista is in the middle of her second, indeed third life. The first is that of the very shy girl – so it assures – that begins to act in search of a refuge from the world: “In order to avoid the school, I followed my mother on the set (the screenwriter Jules Mann, the father is the television producer John Stewart, ed.)”. At 12 he turns Panic Room by David Fincher next to Jodie Foster. “For me it was a” Scary Lady “, it was afraid of me, instead it was wonderfully welcoming.”

At 18 he enters the phase of Twilightwho conquers teenagers but vampire Her love story with the co -star Robert Pattinson, who ended up a few years later for her betrayal with director Rupert Sanders. We are in 2012, which is also the year of the turning point in the author’s cinema with On the road by Walter Salles, followed by Sils Maria by Olivier Assayas e Café Society by Woody Allen. And the beginning of a metamorphosis: the former shy from the sweet face publicly declares his bisexuality, he expresses himself on civil rights and #metoo, he shows his hand in his hand with his girlfriends (Alicia Cargile, St. Vincent). For six years She is linked to the screenwriter Dylan Meyer he married, in an intimate ceremony last April.

The film begins with the water of a swimming pool that fills with blood, an evocative image. Why did you choose such a painful and difficult story for the debut with the direction?
Because being a woman is a violent experience even for those who have not suffered trauma like those of the writer. For me The chronology of water It is a book-shaving: it opened my eyes on what I had never seen of myself. The inner voice that you are silent yourself, the instinct you don’t listen to, the thought that does not express out of shame. Women suffocate themselves for quiet living. Lidia Yuknavitch metabolized her trauma with writing, she transformed them into a resource to live with us, and she managed to find joy.

He also tells domestic violence with which he has done all his life. How did you reflect yourself?
It is as if he had given me the keys of my own house, and not because I have similar experiences but because I understood how important body sensations are, the skin. It is a cliché to say that we have all been, and always, crushed. In the story of Lidia you can reflect anyone who has been silenced or is ashamed of being himself. And there isn’t, women happens more. Woe to say how we feel, putting others uncomfortable. We are the ones who receive and give life, physically, while the male figures try to condition and dictate law: your father, a professor, the psychiatrist, even God.

“Bringing this movie to Cannes was like bringing schools to schools with a bizarre haircut”

Or a director, if we touch the world of cinema. Has his way of seeing Hollywood and career also changed?
Once I analyzed what I saw about Hollywood. The idea that anyone who has made me on the basis of photos, interviews and films is not completely wrong, but is the package sold by an obsessed industry from money. Today I don’t think about it and I dedicate myself to anything else. I am happy to have brought this dreamlike film to Cannes, a little “French”. It was like looking at a son to go to school after you cut his hair in a bizarre way, to find out that instead he likes. I dedicated eight years of my life.

Let’s start from the beginning. Read the book in 2017.
And I wanted to meet Lidia, because I immediately thought of bringing the Memoir to the screen. The best literature has this effect, when it touches personal ropes: you would like to read aloud, share that story with all those you can. To show, in the case of Yuknavitch, how art is a tool to cheat bad luck.

Are the stories saving for her too? They are the ones who make humans and me go on, who I found in the movies something to fight for. The stories open to others, make you grow and reflect. If I have put all of myself in this job it is because I feel it personal but I think it can touch many others and others.

In the meantime, this project has not prevented them from playing 12 films. She was the actress Jean Seberg in Seberg – in the sights by Benedict Andrews, one of the Charlie’s Angels of Elizabeth Banks and the Lady D of Spencer by Pablo Larraín, who brought her an Oscar candidacy. He was also directed by his wife, Dylan Meyer, in the comedy The Wrong Girls. How did he do?
I threatened to stop if I couldn’t have made my movie. I risked not succeeding, I wrote and rewritten it, I did too many shooting because I didn’t want a linear biopic. I had to put the pieces back on the table and recompose the puzzle. As a stubborn, I found the emotional thread I was looking for and I am grateful to time, which helps to understand who you are and what you want.

Are you afraid of failure?
There were times when I felt totally dried up, every day I seemed to lose pieces. I asked for advice from Larraín and Sofia Coppola, both precious. But the most incredible was the French producer Charles Gillibert: he had tried to convince me to find a less difficult and expensive project, but he supported me the same.

There is always her work as an actress: she shot about sixty titles at the age of 35. And it’s a celebrity.
I keep being an actress, of course. As for celebrities I don’t know if they exist more, or at least they are not untouchable and “immense” as in gold times. We are fragile, pull down from the pedestal and I think it is better like this. We must all think of really important things.
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